Cities, Economic Competition and Urban Policy FROM THE PUBLISHER
Sine 1991 regeneration policy in England has experienced a major realignment involving a paradigm shift in the principles that guide practice. Epitomized by a range of new initiatives such as City Challenge, City Pride and the Single Regeneration Budget, policy since 1991 has sought to improve the competitive position of cities. It has done this by encouraging new integrated approaches to deal with economic decline, social deprivation and social exclusion based on stimulating the mainstream economy, creating wealth and improving competitiveness and linking the opportunities created to the needs of deprived communities. Increasingly, the allocation of funding has moved away from formula-driven mechanisms, based on an assessment of need, towards a controversial competitive bidding process of policy formulation and implementation. Governance practices have become redefined, multi-sector partnerships have become the norm, a 'new localism' has been encouraged, and policy has been dominated by a contract culture.
Cities, Economic Competition and Urban Policy is the first book to provide a critical evaluation of this phase of regeneration policy. The book analyses these developments in the context of wider shifts occurring in the economic, social and political spheres of society. Regeneration policy since 1991 became an important part of the Conservative's wider agenda to restructure Britain economically, socially, spatially and ideologically. It became an important element in the government's response to the increasingly competitive global economic system and to the crisis in regeneration policy of the 1980s, part of an experimental search for new local solutions to the contemporary urban(and rural) crisis. The Regulation approach is used to explain these developments by focusing on changes in the socio-institutional structures and processes associated with this phase of policy. A new historical categorization of policy initiatives is proposed.
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